The other day Xyla Foxlin released an episode about how planes fly. At the heart of that was the fact that on FAA written tests you are required, if you want to pass, to give an explanation that is objectively wrong. The classic explanation for lift that I was taught decades ago. To get the question “right” you have to give an answer that is wrong.
And it is not like I don’t understand why this happens. In the case of flight, that wrong understanding is the standard belief and that is hard to change, because of the nature of belief.
There is this guy, who is a student in an Environmental and Landscape Management Program at Seneca College. He seems like a pretty active energy activist. And he repeats misconceptions about wind&solar all the time. And he cannot be persuaded easily with maths or data. And I get why. In his “Environmental” classes the curriculum is likely filled with common misinformation about “renewables,” just as in Economics programs, content has been based, for decades, on long discredited (reproducibility crisis) studies.
In economics “Growth in a Time of Debt” is a great example of this. That study was shown to be cherry-picked nonsense in 2013. But it is foundational to Conservative economics philosophy. So, in a class setting, an Economics student might be required to pretend that Growth in a Time of Debt’s conclusions are valid, perhaps while knowing that they are, probably deliberately, wrong.
And just like that the “Environmental and Landscape Management” student may need to pretend misconceptions, probably deliberate, are true, in order to get a mark on a test. But that is NEVER an excuse for propagating those lies in the face of lots of contrary data, calculations and evidence.
That would make no more sense than insisting that the outdated understanding of lift is a complete and comprehensive explanation of how planes fly.
